Buying an Athlon 64

Mutant_Fruit

Where can these be bought in Europe.

What upgrade deals are there (e.g. mobo, ram and cpui for EURxxx)

etc.

Mac daddy

did a quick google for ya

amd64forsale

koneko

I'd wait until the prices go down...

But Scan have them on their Today Only page aswell.

but wait until the prices go down is my advice

Mac daddy

a little searching does no harm

overclockers.uk

Mac daddy

for the fx model price is Price: £575.00 (£675.63 Including VAT at 17.5%)

for the normal AMD Athlon 64 3200 the price is Price: £314.95 (£370.07 Including VAT at 17.5%)

POUNDS:eek: :eek: :eek:

jesus_thats_gre

You had wanna be mad to buy one of those bad boys at their current prices... Never mind the fact that there isnt any 64 bit mass market software out there to speak off.....

MrPinK

Unless you have a 64bit operating system there's not much point in getting one. You'll have no problem getting a 64-bit linux, just recompile everything yourself and you'll have one incredibly fast system, but most ppl will be waiting for Windows 64 to be released. It should be out by the end of the year.

red_ice

just wait untill christmas and all will be worth it

astrofool

february or march next year will be the time to buy.

Was the same with the athlon remember, they had slot A for 6 months, and then changed over.

Mutant_Fruit

**coughs** linux

Anyway, i tried searching myself, but me and google don't always work well together, i found nothing.

Tnx for the links.

Also, i'm currently running on an Athlon 850mhz, 128meg ram. Its feeling the burn trying to run WinXP. Its why i'm trying to see if i can get the Athlon64, a mobo, and 512 of ram for under 600eur. If i can, i'll probably get it, but the odds are that i'm gonna wait another month or so, and get em as a christmas present to myself.

Unless you have a 64bit operating system there's not much point in getting one.

Its still a kickass 32bit processor!


PS: twincube don't ship to ireland... i did say in europe...

netman

you'll be lucky to find the cpu alone for under 600 euro, even in a month. i don't think it gonna be before next christmas that you'll be able to get an athlon64 cpu, motherboard and ram for under 600.

on to another matter.. what the heck is going on with windows? a friend of mine was reviewing the athlon64, and they got 64-bit edition of windows that didn't work!

further investigation revealed that it was an itanium edition of windows, and they had to get the athlon64 edition from microsoft... i know it's a beta, but what the hey?! are we gonna have different windows for different CPU's now?

astrofool

itanium windows 64 has been out for ages now. And yes, diff windows for diff cpu's.

x86-64 windows will be able to run all current applications, which is the good part of it. Problem is in getting all 64bit drivers.

MrPinK

Intel decided to abandon the x86 instruction set (about 20 years too late imo) in favour of an EPIC instruction set, so a seperate version of windows was needed. It's a nice idea, but it wasn't implemented very well, the Itanium just turned out to be a bit **** really. Add to that the fact that it can't run 32bit code natively, and a lot of ppl don't see much hope for the itanium in the desktop market. I reckon Intel will have to follow the path that AMD have laid down and use x86-64, in which case we'll be back to same windows for different chips.

Mutant_Fruit

True, amd's chip is 10x better than intels 64 bit offering. In the end, intel will have to ditch their chip and follow AMD's route. The reason for the incompatibilities is that the chips have different instructions built in, and the current windows 64bit always calls on the itanium instructions, which the AMD chip doesn;t have.

I would have hoped that both sets of instructions would be built into the one windows, preventing the need for a seperaete edition.

Scruff

looks like Microsoft may force intel to use AMDx64 extensions.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11785

quite understandable, but intel will be eating humble pie after 20+ years of setting the standard for x86 processors.

jesus_thats_gre

Seemingly Intel have already developed an equivelent chip to the Athlon 64 just in case the Athlon 64 starts to sell better than they would like it too.. That is they can tack on the 64 bit instruction set onto the current P4's so the processor can run both 32 bit and 64 bit apps.....

Mutant_Fruit

yeah, but "tacking on" and suchlike is gonna take a few months. if AMD slut out their chip they can graba nice chunk of the market.